AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Tom Shoop

Tom Shoop is vice president and editor in chief at Government Executive Media Group, where he oversees both print and online editorial operations. He started as associate editor of Government Executive magazine in 1989; launched the company’s flagship website, GovExec.com, in 1996; and was named editor in chief in 2007.

December 8, 2016
In a surprise move, President Obama on Thursday evening increased next year’s average pay raise for civilian federal employees to 2.1 percent, up from the 1.6 percent he had proposed earlier in the year and reaffirmed in late November. The raise goes into effect in January 2017, unless Congress takes...

December 2, 2016
Former House Speaker and erstwhile presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has ruled out serving in Donald Trump’s cabinet, saying he’ll “be focused on strategic planning.” This week the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page weighed in with a proposal for the kind of planning Gingrich could be involved in: heading an effort...

November 17, 2016
In an age when threats are proliferating and once-secretive military operations often are broadcast in real time across a range of social media, the nation’s integrated intelligence community must be “agile and adaptive,” the Pentagon’s intelligence chief said Thursday. Speaking at the Defense One Summit in Washington, Defense Undersecretary for...

November 15, 2016
In the final stretch of the presidential campaign, Government Executive’s research arm, the Government Business Council, conducted a survey of federal employees which covered not only their presidential preferences (Hillary Clinton by a wide margin), but their attitudes on serving the next administration. More than a quarter of those who...

September 20, 2016
ORLANDO, Fla. — The nation’s governors and other high-ranking state officials are putting increased focus on cybersecurity issues and the people responsible for managing them, according to a new study. The survey of state chief information security officers and leaders of business operations in state government found that more than...

September 19, 2016
ORLANDO, Fla. — After years of pressure to prevent costly missteps on big information technology projects, state chief information officers are increasingly experimenting with agile software development, CIOs said at a conference here Monday. Agile is an incremental approach that contrasts with the traditional “waterfall” method, in which a project...

August 31, 2016
Donald Trump expounded on his views of the federal government Tuesday, saying he would make it streamlined and effective, but with a “big, fat beautiful heart.” At a campaign rally in Everett, Washington, the GOP nominee said that in a Trump administration, “government will become lean and mean, except —...

August 30, 2016
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is heading up Donald Trump’s presidential transition planning, will host an “inside look” at how it is unfolding next month for donors who contribute $5,000 to help fund the effort. Politico’s Playbook reported the news of the fundraiser Tuesday. The event, for 40 donors,...

August 8, 2016
In a major economic address Monday at the Detroit Economic Club, Donald Trump offered up some boilerplate GOP criticism of his Democratic rival: “All Hillary Clinton has to offer,” he said, “is more of the same: more taxes, more regulations, more bureaucrats, more restrictions on American energy and American production.”...

August 1, 2016
Twenty years ago today, I was sitting in my office eagerly — and tensely — waiting for our information technology team to flip the switch on a server and launch us into the digital age. We’d spent months building GovExec.com from scratch to reach this moment of truth. Luckily, it...

Database-level encryption had its origins in the 1990s and early 2000s in response to very basic risks which largely revolved around the theft of servers, backup tapes and other physical-layer assets. As noted in Verizon’s 2014, Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR)1, threats today are far more advanced and dangerous.

In order to better understand the current state of external and internal-facing agency workplace applications, Government Business Council (GBC) and Riverbed undertook an in-depth research study of federal employees. Overall, survey findings indicate that federal IT applications still face a gamut of challenges with regard to quality, reliability, and performance management.

PIV- I And Multifactor Authentication: The Best Defense for Federal Government Contractors

This white paper explores NIST SP 800-171 and why compliance is critical to federal government contractors, especially those that work with the Department of Defense, as well as how leveraging PIV-I credentialing with multifactor authentication can be used as a defense against cyberattacks

This research study aims to understand how state and local leaders regard their agency’s innovation efforts and what they are doing to overcome the challenges they face in successfully implementing these efforts.

The U.S. healthcare industry is rapidly moving away from traditional fee-for-service models and towards value-based purchasing that reimburses physicians for quality of care in place of frequency of care.